ALSO BY DONNA MORRISSEY
The Deception of Livvy Higgs
What They Wanted
Sylvanus Now
Downhill Chance
Kit’s Law
VIKING
an imprint of Penguin Canada Books Inc.,
a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Canada Books Inc., 320 Front Street West, Suite 1400, Toronto, Ontario M5V 3B6, Canada
Penguin Group (USA) LLC, 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.
Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd)
Penguin Group (Australia), 707 Collins Street, Melbourne, Victoria 3008, Australia
Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017, India
Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632, New Zealand
Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa
Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
First published 2016
Copyright © Donna Morrissey, 2016
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
Publisher’s note: This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Cover design: Lisa Jager
Cover image: (man and dog) Ibai Acevedo/Getty Images;
(clouds) GYN9037/Shutterstock.com
LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION
Morrissey, Donna, 1956-, author
The fortunate brother / Donna Morrissey.
ISBN 978-0-670-06606-3 (paperback)
I. Title.
PS8576.O74164F67 2016 C813′.54 C2015-908753-8
Ebook ISBN 9780143196211
www.penguinrandomhouse.ca
v4.1
a
Contents
Cover
Also by Donna Morrissey
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
FOR MY BROTHERS, TOM & GLENN,
AND OUR BELOVED FORD
There is no despair so absolute as that which comes with the first moments of our first great sorrow, when we have not yet known what it is to have suffered and be healed, to have despaired and to have recovered hope.
—GEORGE ELIOT
ONE
The river’s pulse was sluggish, wearied with winter’s run. He laid aside his fishing rod and dropped beside it, equally wearied with too much thought from rambling through his father’s house. Gawd-damnit, Kyle, stop chewin’ them fingers, Sylvanus was always grumbling. He shook off his wool mitt and chewed now at a hangnail that was sending slivers of pain through his thumb. There’s people who cut themselves to escape the pain in their heads, his friend Kate had said the other night, strumming her guitar beside the bonfire. That why you chewin’ your fingers, Kyle, to escape a pain in your head?
Gawd-damn. Least it was his fingers he chewed. If Kate was right and his mouth was big enough, he’d have his head gnawed down to a stump. He looked upriver to where his father was likely staggering to catch up. Too many swallows of whisky too late in the day. He was usually drunk and sobered up by now.
His own mouth was dry from drink. He’d broken his own rule back there, drinking before dark. He scooped river water into his mouth, sloshed it around, and then spat it out and sat back. Across the river, massive wooded hills of the northern peninsula sighed through the fog. A long flagging reach downriver and the water buckled against the northern cliff wall, pooling itself into dead black depths before elbowing out of sight through a thicket of still leafless alders and drowning itself into the sea just beyond.
He glanced upriver again, listening for his father, Sylvanus Now. They’d heard a few hours before from some of the boys angling for trout that Trapp was back for another of his infrequent night visits when he visited nobody and spoke to nobody and then vanished again before sun-up. Trapp. Weird, feral Trapp. Prowling through the darkened places where he’d once lived. Then vanishing with the light of dawn, leaving nothing in his wake but raised brows and the hackles of folks from the Hampden outport. Trapp. Aptly nicknamed, for he carried the dark, disagreeable, secretive ways of all the Trapps. Bad blood, outport people said of the two Trapp brothers who’d relocated there during the government’s resettlement program. And thank God the rest of the Trapp clan had gone forty miles farther down the shore in Jackson’s Arm. They—the two Trapp brothers—had kept to themselves on the wooded hillside above Kyle’s home. They’d started up a sawmill and bad-mouthed anyone who set foot over their property line. Everyone had applauded the mysterious burning of the screaming sawmill just two years ago and the Trapps’ subsequent packing up and moving with no forwarding address. Except for this younger Trapp. The prowler. He was from the Jackson’s Arm side of the clan. Never did live in Hampden, simply visited his uncles regularly and buddied around with Ben, the nicest fellow in Hampden, who always let Trapp hang out no matter his sly looks and his creeping and skittering about like something untamed. He’d gone to university with Ben until they both mysteriously dropped out mid-semester and vanished into the oilfields of Alberta.
Trapp. One of the last to see Chris alive. He’d been working the rig alongside Chris when the accident happened. And each time Sylvanus heard that Trapp had been seen squirrelling about he’d lean greedily into the news, into the concreteness of something that linked him to the last minutes of his son’s life. Like a lost Christmas package found, mouldy and dank with age. Holding something that might soothe him, bring him peace.
Kyle felt nothing. He remembered a yarn about a monkey’s paw that granted an old woman her wish that her son, dead for a number of years, would be returned to her. He was. The stench through the wooden door saturated the house and the old woman fainted, knowing he’d been returned as he was—ten years dead. Skin dried, shredding from husked bone. Nope. Kyle Now was done with wishing. He was settled into the hollowed ache of his brother’s death, and if this ache was the closest he could feel to Chris, he’d suffer it through till his own demise. At least it was something. Without it there would be nothing.
His father had said nothing back there with the anglers. Hadn’t said Chris’s name once in the three years since they buried him. Wouldn’t let anyone else say it either. Dropped his fork at the supper table once and bolted out the door when Kyle, naming the bowls as he laid them on the table for dessert, named one for Chris out of habit. If not for the desolate look on his mother’s face, Kyle would’ve run from his words too. Ducked into his room and buried his head so deep into his pillow he would’ve smothered all thought.
His mother knew that. She had touched his hand to stay him. And then sipped her
tea in quiet and he wanted to touch her hand, too, but couldn’t. Oh, he wished he could. He wished he could drag his father back to the table and they’d all say a prayer to Chris as his mother wanted. And act as though he was present in spirit like the good folks and ministers preached. But easier to envision celestial worlds floating through the firmament than Chris sitting in that empty chair at the table. And so Chris remained, foremost amongst them but hidden beneath their shirt collars like a great festering boil begging to be lanced.
A horned owl swooshed out of the trees above Kyle’s head with a loud ho-ho-hoo hoo and he ducked, cursing the bird. The snapping of sticks sounded behind him and his father broke through the brush, head down, shoulders down, walking heavy. Rowing against a poisonous river of grief for three years now, going nowhere. Time wearing past him. Threading grey through his glut of dark hair and thickening his belly and rutting that once strong face and throat. He caught sight of Kyle and grinned, the corners of his dark eyes tight. He’d been bawling back there.
“Thought you fell in and drowned,” said Kyle.
Sylvanus grunted. “That’s it now.” Laying aside his rod, he dropped his rucksack and sat on it with his back resting against a stump and pulled a flask of whisky from his inside coat pocket.
“Leave off, old man, for fuck’s sake,” said Kyle. “Mother’s going to kill you.”
“Think now, I’m scared of your mother?”
“Might help if you were. Another heart attack waiting for you.”
Sylvanus tipped the bottle to his mouth, his hand trembling. Hiking his shoulders, Kyle stood. “Not waiting.” He started downstream, ignoring his father calling after him, coaxing him to wait, to have a nip. Gawd, he hated that coaxing in his father’s voice, the greed in his eyes as he sucked back the liquor. As if it was going to fix the pain gnawing his innards.
Kyle kept to the path, his boots squelching through mud. He ducked through a tunnel of alders whose leafless limbs scratched his face and whipped cold past his ears. A few minutes later and he broke through onto a fetid muddied bank. The river ran swollen beside it, its surface flat and silent and white beneath its caul of fog. He trod past chip bags and wrappers partly submerged in mud and broken beer bottles and charred fire pits from night parties. He stopped, scuffed some of the glass into the river, picked up a couple of chip bags and stuffed them in his pockets, cursing the irresponsible young ones. He stood up, then leaped back with a yelp from a pale, pointed face sifting through the fog before him. Tawny hair and ruffs of sideburns, reddish like a fox. Fine green eyes, the dazed look of someone lost inside himself, and yet furtive, sharp with tension as though readying to spring.
“Ha ha.” Trapp’s silly, nasal laugh.
“Ha ha your fucking self,” said Kyle. He forced his shocked limbs to move and walked rapidly along the riverbank, coming to a footbridge beyond which his father’s truck was parked, a black smudge through the mist. Three crumbling concrete pillars from an old logging operation rose to the side of it like ancient ruins.
He got in the truck and started it and blasted the heat and pulled the stick into drive—and then pushed it back into park and slumped in his seat, cursing. Cursing at his fright and stirred up feelings from seeing Trapp, and cursing that he couldn’t go home without his father. She’d be there making supper. She’d be watching. She was always watching when they came through the door, noting Sylvanus’s bleary eyes and whisky breath. Kyle hated it. Hated her disappointment each time, her knowing that her husband was no longer finding his comfort in her. And then the bickering.
Three beer, Addie, three beer, I only had three beer.
And the whisky you washed them down with.
Now Addie, now Addie…
Don’t now Addie me…
The same. Always the same. Least the river kept on flowing, no matter how much crap it carried. Always shifting bedrock and cutting through ice and changing its song. Felt like he’d been circling the same eddy for so long now that he was outside the passing of time. Sometimes he was surprised to look up into a summer’s sky and see instead the trees shaking their yellowed leaves or snowflakes falling all too soon and soaking his lashes. Felt like the one long day for three years now. The one long dull day, caught on a cloud of grief hovering over his house.
Water dripped from his hair and trickled cold down his neck. He reached under the seat, found another of his father’s whisky bottles, and took a quick nip to warm himself. He watched the fog through the windshield sculpting itself into Trapp’s pale pointy face, shifting into the fierce blue of his mother’s eyes and then into the dark of his father’s, and then widening onto the dark blue hood of the truck. The cursed truck Chris had left home to pay for. That and the boat. The good lord had taken a hand in sinking the boat a week after Chris’s passing. Crushed it against the side of the wharf with a ton of drifting ice from the spring thaw.
He wished the ice had crunched up over the road and crushed the truck, too. Rammed it against the cliffs and crunched it down to a heap of metal. Kept him from driving it through the outport like a hearse the first couple of years after Chris’s accident, his father drunk and slumped against him, whimpering like a cut dog. Circled the outport so many times old men in their windows started keeping count. Thirteen times one Saturday. Seventeen times another. Each circle ending with Kyle parking near the graveyard down on the Rooms and looking past the crumbling granite headstones to the newest one lodged over the hole where Chris lay. Christopher Now. 1957–1980. Taken Too Soon. He’d stare for hours at that headstone, his father whimpering and suckling the whisky bottle beside him. Stared till his eyes turned to stone and his tears dried up like an old riverbed.
Shame, drinking over his passing and getting maudlin with your own sorry self.
Drinking! Now Addie…
And having Kyle driving you around like that, not fit.
Now Addie…
Don’t now Addie me, drinking before you leaves the doorplace in the mornings.
Three beers, I haves three beers…
And the whisky you washes them down with…
Don’t talk, don’t talk, for fuck’s sake don’t talk, he’d plead silently with his father each time he drove him home drunk before noon and she’d be standing there, waiting. But Sylvanus had the staying power of a sapling beneath an easterly wind when she took a swipe at him. Not that he’d ever learned from it. No, by jeezes, he’d never learn to keep his mouth shut, as though he could argue himself out of shame.
One beer, Addie, I had one beer.
Too drunk to see past your boots.
I can see far enough to the Rooms. That’s as far as I’m going—the graveyard on the Rooms.
Drinking yourself dead.
Now, Addie, the pope serves more in church than what I drinks.
You knows a lot about the pope, you do.
If what they’re preaching on TV is right, we’d all be better off not going. Sickos.
That what you says to the reverend when he’s burying our dead?
Now Addie…
You dare hide your drinking behind him.
I wants him back, Addie, I wants him back…
Times Kyle sank into the couch with his hands over his ears, shutting them out. His older sister, Sylvie, sitting across from him in Gran’s old rocker by the stove, her face hidden inside a book. Those first years neither Kyle nor his sister left the house for long. There were fist holes in the walls reminding them of those times. A smattering of them led down the hallway and one was smack in the middle of their parents’ bedroom door. Not that their father would ever lay a hand on his Addie. But times her tongue would lacerate his drunken mind to the point where he’d hit a wall just to feel the smack of his fist splintering wood. Kyle understood that. No different from him chewing his fingers. Except Kyle’s was a peaceful brooding. He’d done nothing to aid Chris’s leaving for the oil rigs in Alberta with Sylvie that morning. But his father had been sick—heart attack from working himself to death fishing
for cod that were too scarce to pay the bills and so he doubled his workload with cutting and hauling logs for the sawmills too. Heart just up and called it quits. New boat and new truck parked out by the door like hungry dogs, growling for their bank payments. And Sylvie. Good good Sylvie stepping up to the fates. Came flying from her high-paying job in the oil-soaked fields of Alberta like Persephone, wife of Hades, Lord of Underground Wealth. Took Chris back with her to the oil fields to help wrestle those snarling dogs and six weeks later Chris was dead. Poor sister. And now she was gone. Off backpacking in Africa somewhere, bewildered by how it all turned out, that her feet continue to walk above the sod whilst Chris’s reside in the shadowed depths of the underworld.
At times Kyle cursed Sylvie and Chris both. For leaving him torn between two grieving parents whose desired end could never be found in him. For his feeling lame because there wasn’t enough of him to fill their hearts. Times he wished for a sword to cleave himself in half: one traipsing behind his father, keeping him from the loneliness of his pain, the other shadowing his mother, helping her cleanse her house of grief.
He stirred in his seat, a sliver of pain darting through the quick of his thumbnail. He’d been chewing his nails again. He reamed his hand into his pocket. Foul! There was something foul about Trapp showing up all the time and never talking to anyone. There was something foul about the whole thing. Sylvie coming home alone with the body. Then Ben coming with Trapp in tow. All three had been tight when they worked the rig. All three had taken a hand in looking out for Chris when he joined them. And yet only Sylvie came home on that flight bearing Chris’s coffin. Sylvie and their mother. Addie. Flying the skies for the first time to help Sylvie bring Chris home. Else Sylvie would still be out there, cowering in the closet where Addie found her. Too distraught to stand. And Ben off searching for Trapp who’d run from the accident and couldn’t be found. They returned three months later, Trapp and Ben. Shame-cast eyes. All three of them—Sylvie, Ben, and Trapp—with shame-cast eyes and a broodiness accompanying their grief. He’d never understood that. Never understood what stalked their sleep at night and eventually sent Ben and Sylvie prowling through savannahs and jungles, leaving Trapp behind to roam in darkness.
The Fortunate Brother Page 1
